Boy, it’s been a while. The last post I had on here about Napoleon, Blown Apart was about a four-player version. Well, I guess I got somewhat busy with work, picked up my music blog again, and just didn’t do a lot of work on this. I also wasn’t feeling super motivated to round up playtesters, which always kind of freaks me out. Even as someone who has been published, I just kind of assume my work is terrible and it’s an injustice to inflict it on other people. There were a number of changes I needed to test, and I was going nowhere.

I did hire Jack Grimes to do a nice layout for my cards and got some decks printed up through DriveThruCards, which I never got around to actually trying. The cards look great! Hire Jack! Anyway, the situation was well and truly stuck. I needed to do something to get it un-stuck.

What I decided to do was do some solo testing so I could test out things locally with just me. This doesn’t usually allow me to tell if a given mechanism is good or fun, but it sometimes does let me identify things that definitely do not work. I’d feel better about putting this thing in front of actual people if I had some more solo mileage on it. Plus, it would be progress, and I could get the juices flowing again. First thing, I fixed up some problems with the rules, which was fine and got me started. I also found some places to make some substantive improvements to the game.

The first improvement was that I had previously added the notion of a “decisive” trick. The only tricks that mattered for scoring were ones there you clearly won the trick. The definition of decisive that I had was either a trick where you beat the opposing cards by at least three ranks, or one where you played a more powerful suit (the ranking of suits varied from hand to hand). The logic was that making some tricks matter and others not would provide a lever for players. You might choose to play a middling card to make a trick non-decisive, but that middling card might have been good for a trick later, so you had to balance it out.

Overall, the basic mechanism was working fine, but the criteria was too broad. Most of the tricks were decisive, and the tricks where you lost to a more powerful suit were not ones you could manipulate using Scouts or +3 Bonus tokens, removing player agency. It also made altering decisive tricks less important, because they were so common. A simple change to only considering the relative ranks made the decisions more interesting. It makes some sense within the theme as well: if the rank represents something like the morale of a unit, a comparison of the morales might help determine if a given engagement was decisive or not, irrespective of the branch of arms of the units. That change alone started feeling a lot better, and the immediately became more enjoyable.

There was another problem that I wanted to fix. It felt like players didn’t have as many options as they should have in terms of controlling the flow of tricks. When another problem cropped up, that the deck size wasn’t big enough to accommodate the largest battles with four players, I could kill two birds with one stone. Thinking about battles and options a real commander might have had to control the flow of combat, if I provided players with the option of a tactical retreat, that might work. It would always be a losing card in the trick, but it would also render the trick non-decisive. You could also control the timing to preserve particular cards in your hand, avoid losing a decisive engagement, and otherwise exercise some additional control over the flow. Trying it out, it felt pretty good. I added six of those cards to the deck, and they came up often enough to feel relevant to a lot of games. Plus, the deck was big enough for the four-player, largest battles.

Beyond those changes, I made a bunch of small changes to tighten up the rules, clearing up inconsistencies here and there. I also took advantage of a chance to simplify where I could, such as the tiebreaker rules for initiative. The biggest thing I cleaned up was the rules around Scouts. Previously, I envisioned them entirely as a bonus, that either improve the strength of a card or allow you to evolve your hand when you want to. But that was causing some problems around corner cases, such as when the deck was pretty empty or towards the end of hands. I tried layering on a bunch of rules to close the corner cases, but it kept getting more convoluted. Backing up a step, there’s no reason why I had to prohibit a Scout from being played on its own. By letting it serve as a Cavalry, played on its own, it cleaned up all the corner cases for when a player had nothing but Scouts in hand. And with that problem fixed, I could now go back to the prohibition on cycling more than once per play, which would stop some of the strangeness with a small deck.

Overall, the changes felt good. The game was playing smoother, the rules were cleaner, and the players had more options and a little more agency. As with Fox in the Forest, a lot of the design work here was going to be providing the players with enough interesting choices in the game to get them to not play hands on automatic. I don’t think I’m quite there yet, I need to give players more options and more things to think through. I’d like to lean in to the unique part of the game, which is that you have a set of resources (your Reserve) that do not replenish and that you have to decide when to deploy. Continuing to push in that direction seems promising, so that’s what I’ll tackle for next time. I also think the scoring isn’t quite there and have some ideas to help fix that up also. Still, progress! It felt good to get things moving again.